james took some photos for twenty-seven names and here they are

Posted on August 29, 2016

James took some photos for twenty-seven names for their NZFW exhibition and I really love them so I have decided to post them. They are some of James’ best work, in my opinion. Very beautiful. They were up at the Allpress Gallery on Drake Street for a couple of days but they are gone now (cool story). They were sitting alongside a blurb about the whole thing which I also really love and have reproduced here:

“Last year we dreamed big, inviting Emma Watson, Beyoncé and Helen Clark to our dinner party. We still haven’t heard back from them yet, maybe their RSVPs got lost in the post, maybe their calendars were a bit tight…? This year, we decided to look closer to home for a higher hit rate. It’s not always about the stars of your favourite Netflix show, or the movers and shakers, or the people winning those gold medals. More often, we’re inspired by our friends, our sisters, our team, our mothers. We took the twenty-seven names team on a road trip with James K. Lowe, and these photographs are the result. Against the ever-inspiring backdrops of Te Henga (Bethells Beach) and Woodhill forest, we see that even in the same clothes we are all individuals. Each of us brings our own stories and our own beauty to the mix: the hair we hated as a teenager, the freckles we tried to wash off. Why couldn’t we have pencil thin eyebrows like everyone else? Whatever it was that made us different, we wanted to change it. But our mums were right, dammit! That difference is where the beauty lies. Maybe loving these things about ourselves is something that comes with age (like a taste for early nights and a plush dressing gown) but maybe it shouldn’t have to. If we can see ourselves in the photographs, in the clothes, we can see that perfection isn’t a prerequisite to beauty. Your eye might jump to that thing you hate to see reflected in a photograph, but what happens when you look for a little longer? And what would happen if, instead of asking “How do I look?” we asked “What will I do today?”